Emasculation Leads to Terrorism Michal

Emasculation Leads to Terrorism

Michal Kimmel attempts explain the criminal acts committed by those like Timothy McVeigh, the American GI, the author of the terrorist attack of a federal building in Oklahoma City, in 1995, Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian suicide bomber involved in the airplanes crashes in September 11, 2001, or Hitler.

Kimmel presents a sketchy portrait of these three, with psychological insights gathered from historical documents, testimonies of their families and peers and speculations and builds up a theory of emasculated low-middle class men who wanted to get even (Kimmel, 2008). Kimmel creates parallels between those white Americans enrolling in civil militia or other forms of paramilitary with the intention to regain "the white man's supremacy" in a flattening world from more than one point-of-view. Kimmel reduces the whole issue to a single sided point-of-view, thus oversimplifying the matter. He is partially successful in his attempt, since there might be some gender-related implications in the mass murder acts the three afore mentioned were involved, no doubt, but there are also various other aspects that are thus left unconsidered. Kimmel focuses on these three as examples to draw a conclusion for the majority of all those who ever thought of blowing up a building or an airplane in order to make a point.

Kimmel starts his analysis with a reminder of all those women who died or suffered along with the men in the unfortunate events of 9/11. He is almost blaming "our haste to lionize the heroes of the World Trade Center collapse" as the danger of unilateralism leading to all dangers. He compares this attitude to that of the Taliban people towards their women. The comparison seems exaggerated, but it may have some hyperbolic motivations.

Kimmel's main argument relies on his discovery made based on the similarities in Timothy McVeigh's letter addressed to an editor of a new York paper, two years prior to his terrorist act and some of the thinking patters the terrorists who blew up World Trade Center had. The author of the article Gender, Class, and Terrorism finds striking similarities in the frustrations the two young men have grown up with and were never able to shake off. Of course there are similarities like age and coming from middle-class families who might have put pressure on them at a young age in order for them to grow "strong" and cope with the demanding modern society. but, other common grounds in the lives of those two can be partially or entirely made up. McVeigh may have been unhappy because he saw globalization as an engulfing ocean that annihilated values he inherited from his father and grandfather and reduced his opportunities to raise above the masses of workers for industrial giants or in administrative offices, like thousands or millions of others in the whole world. On top of that, he may have been a repressed homosexual and in desperate need to find a scapegoat for his failure. Atta may also have been a potential repressed homosexual, fighting to keep up with his father's demands to prove his masculinity and be at least as worthy of his family as his sisters who became doctors and married doctors. Hitler may also have been a repressed homosexual who sought and killed homosexuals because of his fear of being exposed as one of them. All these assumptions may be true, but their will to regain and affirm their masculinity, transformed in mass murder acts that communicate to the entire world is not plausible because they were not alone in their acts. In the case of the German dictator, there was a whole administrative and political apparatus that backed him up and even a whole nation stood by his as long as he was convincing enough. Should we assume that all those who believed in Hitler, associated with him or just did not oppose him were all repressed homosexuals who were afraid of being exposed?

It is true that in the case of terrorist acts, the authors of those acts are a few and they are usually impossible or difficult to attach to a certain ideology or movement. In other words, that being the characteristic that makes terrorism so hard to fight back because there is no particular country or region that once fought against and defeated will lead to their annihilation. The hypothesis that the American terrorist and the Egyptian in his turn were hunted by their own emasculation is possible and psychologists could back it up if there was enough evidence to support such a theory. On the other hand, supposing that turns out to be true, one cannot extend this theory to the whole world. Should we consider that as long as men will feel threatened by women for their jobs and positions in society, they will most likely revolt agains the whole society, regardless of its gender?